Keynote: Lean Software Delivery: Synchronizing Cadence with Context

Daily, we are told that adopting agile, PaaS, DevOps, crowdsourced testing, or any of the myriad of current buzzwords will help us deliver better software faster. However, for the majority of software development organizations, naïve agile transformations that don’t look beyond the needs of developers will fail to produce the promised results. Mik Kersten says that instead of focusing on development alone to transform our software delivery, we must acknowledge the different contexts and mismatched cadences that define the work of business analysts, developers, testers, and project managers. For example, a developer working in an agile team may deliver code every two weeks, but the performance testing group may need more time for its work, while the operations group has a planned release cycle of once per quarter. To achieve optimum flow, which is the goal of end-to-end lean delivery, we must identify the different cadences of each group and interconnect the collaborators and their work—requirements, development, testing, and deployment.

As CEO of Tasktop Technologies Mik Kersten sets the strategic direction of the company and drives many of Tasktop's key partnerships and key customer accounts. He is very active in maintaining the company culture and values. Mik created the Eclipse Mylyn open source project and the task-focused interface while working on his Ph.D. in computer science. As a research scientist at Xerox PARC, Mik implemented the first aspect-oriented programming tools for AspectJ. He has been an Eclipse committer since 2002, is a three-time elected member of the Eclipse board of directors, and serves on the Eclipse Architecture Council.